Over the last four years, Africa’s emerging digital market has recorded the fastest growth rate and is the clear leader of international bandwidth growth globally.
And with eight new cables projected in the coming years, the continent presents a veritable fulcrum for critical discourse among top industry players.
This formed the bedrock of discussions at a recent event where MainOne, a leading provider of connectivity and data center services for businesses in West Africa, joined founding submarine operators, Ciena to discuss Africa's emerging submarine cable market and its impact on broadband penetration.
As the world’s second most populous continent with 1.4billion people and covering 20% of the planet’s landmass, adequate availability of digital infrastructure across the continent will play a crucial socioeconomic role in helping to increase critical connectivity options to close the digital divide, connecting Africa to the rest of the digitized world. Today, only 25 percent of the 1.4 billion African people are connected.
Anil Verma, Chief Technical Officer of MainOne, highlighted the critical role that MainOne has been playing in deepening broadband penetration and enabling digital growth in Africa.
He hinted that MainOne remains the only multinational to boast of service coverage in 10 West African countries, connected to IXs in London, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Marseille and Frankfurt, Lagos, Accra and Abidjan with three additional IP transit ports, with Tier 1 ISPs in Europe.
Bearing in mind that submarine cables carry close to 99% of the world's intercontinental electronic communications traffic, Africa requires access to this global submarine network infrastructure to fully benefit from an international digital economy.
It is noteworthy that MainOne maintains over 50 Points of Presence (PoPs) across Africa and Europe that move data traffic across her network and her Tier III data center subsidiary – MDXi, with headquarters in Africa’s most populous city, Lagos. The company also lands her submarine cable in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire where she equally operates data centers (in Accra and Abidjan).
The combination of a submarine cable network, terrestrial metropolitan fiber infrastructure, data centre assets, and broad interconnect ecosystem makes MainOne a key enabler of digital transformation across West Africa
